Microsoft: "here's our best stab at what a great browser looks like - and it took us 14 years to get here".
Google: "we've been working on a codebase for 2 years. We decided to release it as a patch to your browser. Our brief foray into this area has improved your best effort by 10x".
Ouch!
So actually, the opposite is true: MS has a big economic incentive to slow down JS performance in browsers, because it will make them more money selling desktop softare. One way to do this is to release new versions of IE which have slow JS interpreters, and use marketing to convince enterprise customers that the new browsers are super-duper top-of-the-line shiny things, with features like security and easy maintainability.
The internet is a killing blow for MSFT's business model, because it devalues all their proprietary assets. And when MSFT relents a bit to the internet and tries to play along, it does this with the same business model that sells software with closed standards (Silverlight)or is protected by patent (.net).
The browser represents a piece of software that enforces neither of these business model components that MSFT absolutely depends on, and it represents the door to computer interaction. This is really bad for MSFT as it exists today. MSFT will be a very different company 20 years from now, but I don't expect it will change without a serious fight given what's at stake. We shouldn't be surprised if MSFT engages in some practices which might be anathema to anybody just expecting a good software product from a company with substantial resources.
Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2 months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in the past couple of decades :-P
1. Scroll to "How We Did It", here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/trac...
Is it really so hard to imagine what life on the inside looks like?
Microsoft is a huge institution. There are hundreds of engineers working on IE. Their work is segmented and bucketed. Some poor engineer has probably spent the last several years doing nothing but maintaining the EOT font format. There are reorganizations, new decisions to realign the next release to meet the goals of other teams, etc. Every decision -- at any level -- requires buy-in from multiple parties with overlapping responsibility. There are, in short, too many cooks in the kitchen.
I'm not saying it isn't ridiculous. But this is how it is inside Microsoft.
I know they have good people in there, but the fact is that they are pulling us back. They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat.
This is the most compelling evidence that Microsoft always thinks about preserving the status-quo instead of advancing the state of the art. It's their decision and their company, but I'm not going to accept apologies for them lightly.
They want to change their image, then they should play nicer with their competition and with us. I don't know how they could do that, but off the top of my head ... why not open-source Silverlight to make it a true standard? But they won't do that since they need control. And round and round we go.
This is very true and I've always felt it is a strong condemnation of what goes on inside Microsoft. I neglected to mention this sorry bit of history in my posts above mostly because it's a bit old news. Today, IE is a fully-staffed, heavily armed, etc.
I don't think I apologized for Microsoft. There is no excuse for having previously shut down IE, or for having such poor execution now that the IE team is back. There are, however, explanations... ones which hopefully help to dispel the myth that Microsoft is, today, intentionally holding the browser back. The truth is much more mundane.
First, it is entirely possible for Microsoft to continue to reap rewards from Windows while improving their browser at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive. I reject the perspective that says the browser will win at the cost of desktop APIs. Everything has its place.
Second, while Windows may make shareholders (and your hypothetical "mid-level executives") fat today, they are under no illusions that it will make them fat tomorrow. Innovating for the future is an earnest and honest goal at Microsoft. This includes the browser, too. Who is to say where the next cash cow will be?
(Also: for some strange reason, I can't reply directly to you. Why would that be the case?)
Making the browser and web applications a viable alternative to their cash cows (Windows, Office, BackOffice) would seriously compromise the fat bonuses even mid-level executives get and would seriously jeopardize top management's position in front of their shareholders.
It simply does not happen this way. Not with a big public company that enjoy a monopoly with insanely fat margins.
When people are united behind a clear vision, amazing things can happen. When they're not...
I wrote more about my experience: http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
Besides that, what kind of talented engineer stays in a company that lacks vision?
So it may not just be the skill of the engine developer, but competing architectures.